Thursday, October 04, 2007

Will Google ever update PageRank again?

Definitely. But why these delays? It used to update every three months or so. As most webmasters noticed, when Pagerank updates, there is no big change in SERPs, so they assumed that Google updates the pageranks much often and they make the changes public every couple of months. It's called pagerank export.

But this time the delay is bigger than ever. This probably happens because too many webmasters started to manipulate the Pagerank by getting paid and reciprocal links. While reciprocal are easy to detect, the problem is with paid links. Paid links are not easy to detect manually and it is even harder to do this automatically. So while Google tests various algorithms for this, they probably decided to delay the pagerank export. This has a quite high impact, because many webmasters started to panic, they invested in links and cannot see the results in Pagerank or some SEO companies have contracts with customers where they promised higher pageranks.

There are many rumors that Google will change the PR to something else. But I disagree. I think it's either google exports the Pagerank in the next couple of weeks and they also come with a good detection system for paid links or they will just stop to make the pagerank public hoping to discourage link buyers and sellers.